Aaron Wolf

Biography

Aaron teaches private music lessons in Portland, OR and is otherwise an activist and advocate for Free Culture and Free Software. He is co-founder of the in-progress web platform Snowdrift.coop, which aims to better encourage community sponsorship of freely-licensed creative works. He is also active in the Linux musicians community, helps with support and documentation for the FLOSS organizing program Task Coach, and is on the Open Definition advisory council.

Open Source Bridge 2015

Sessions for this user

Software freedom advocates sometimes believe a myth of "trickle-down technology" — that open collaboration and freedom for programmers will somehow lead to more free and open technology for the rest of society. To build technology that truly empowers most people, we need more non-programmers actively involved in development.
I'll share my story of how I started as a music teacher and became the co-founder of an ambitious Free/Libre/Open project. We'll discus lessons about outreach to others like me.

Proposals for this user

The range of options for music-making on GNU/Linux with free/libre/open tools stretches from music-focused programming languages like CSound and PureData to simple tools like Audacity, Ardour, Guitarix, Hydrogen, and Musescore which are accessible to novice members of the general public.
We'll explore the options for different sorts of musical creativity, focusing on the basic tools and how to get them set up effectively on GNU/Linux. In the session, we'll produce some brief compositions and recordings as we explore the software.

Open Source Bridge 2014

Proposals for this user

In designing Snowdrift.coop, we have done our due diligence. For example, we actually reviewed over 700 crowdfunding and related platforms. We've read dozens of Codes of Conduct. This is the Open Source ideal: making the most of past resources and ideas.
I can tell you about such things as the struggles with the idea of bounty fundraising (where you offer to pay if someone makes a certain feature or fixes a certain bug in a program). It's been a popular idea but has some fatal flaws. There have been dozens of failed bounty-style funding systems, but a few have somewhat succeeded (and I can tell you which of those are the most ethical and Open Source). People who have not researched the history keep proposing this same flawed idea over and over.
In this talk, I'll share with you the challenges and insights in building a new platform dedicated to Free/Libre/Open ideals and how we have made tough choices about when to avoid wheel-reinventing and when to break with the past and push for new ideals.